The Word Somebody Used Was Naive

The word was naive, and it was followed by no offense, and everybody at the table did that small pleasant nod that means the subject is now closed.

It was a good evening otherwise. These are his friends. One of them helped him move house. Nobody was being cruel, and if he had said actually that stung they would have been mortified and meant it.

But he has been chewing it for a fortnight, because it was not really an insult. It was a diagnosis. It was said in the tone you use for a fact everybody has already accepted, and what it said was: whatever else you are, on this one subject you have switched your brain off, and we all rather like you anyway.

And he has half agreed with it, in private, ever since. Not about God. About himself. He has started to feel that his faith is the one room in his house with the light off, and that the sensible people have simply been kind enough not to mention it.

That is your table. That is your fortnight. And I want to hand you something, because there is a line about where thinking actually begins and it is not where anybody at that table assumed.

Where wisdom starts

There is a sentence that turns up three times in the Old Testament in slightly different clothes, which is the Bible's way of underlining something.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: a good understanding have all they that do his commandments.Psalm 111:10

The beginning of wisdom.

Not the end of it. Not a substitute for it. The beginning: the place the whole enterprise starts from, the first stone rather than the ceiling. The verse is not describing a person who has finished thinking. It is describing where a thinking life gets its footing.

And notice it says a good understanding, which is an ordinary phrase about ordinary sense, and it puts that squarely in the same sentence.

You are standing on the beginning of wisdom. Not on the far side of intelligence. The written word puts the fear of the Lord at the start of understanding rather than in opposition to it, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that a live thing in a man who has been quietly ashamed of his own mind for a fortnight.

Now let me say something about your friends, because a fortnight of chewing has started to make them into something they are not.

The man who said it was not sneering. He was repeating an idea that is in the water where you both live, and he has never had a reason to examine it, and he would help you move house again tomorrow. He is not an opponent to be beaten. He is a friend with a received opinion.

You have no case to win at that table. The written word does not make your standing depend on how an argument went in a back room. The Holy Spirit is as fond of your friend as He is of you, and there is no side of the table He is on.

And now the thing you have actually been carrying, which is not the word he used.

It is that you could not answer. You went pleasant, and you changed the subject, and you have spent a fortnight assembling the reply you did not give.

Being unable to argue is not the same as being wrong, and it never has been. Most true things are held by people who could not defend them under pressure at nine in the evening with four friends watching.

You are not required to win it to keep it. The beginning of wisdom rests on who God is rather than on your recall for arguments. The Holy Spirit did not think less of you for going pleasant, and He is not waiting for a better performance next time.